New Sentinels of the Seas: Satellite AIS and the Birth of Global Maritime Awareness

By Geo. Guy Thomas

In New Sentinels of the Seas, intelligence veteran George Guy Thomas, author of A Silent Warrior Steps Out of the Shadows, presents

• Language: English
• Publisher: New Bay Books LLC
• Release date: Jul 10, 2023
• ISBN: 9798985347760

Geo. Guy Thomas

Guy Thomas is a maritime security expert who spent decades in intelligence in the US Navy, and Air Force and has been associated with a broad range of other US government agencies and private companies. He was among the first US Navy Space Operations specialists and was a participant in White House meetings leading to the National Space Policy. He was the first member of the Navy, Marines or Army awarded Air Force wings. Serving 23 years in the US Navy, including five years with the US Air Force, Guy has substantial experience in many aspects of naval and air operations, especially in the reconnaissance field. Embarked in cruisers, submarines and aircraft in hostile environments, he led the collection, analysis, and real time provision of intelligence to operational commanders, including nearly a year (total) in combat. He participated directly in 30-plus MIG engagements over Vietnam, a record for a signals intelligence team chief that stands today. He led the mission system acceptance trials of the highly automated EP-3E in the Pacific and was among the first designated US Navy Space Operations subspecialists. For his service as the test director of the Initial Operational Test and Evaluation of Rivet Joint III (RC-135W), the first US Air Force aircraft to use a fully computerized mission system, he was the first member of the Navy, Marines or Army ever awarded Air Force wings. He also qualified for the USAF Space Badge. He also participated as the intelligence collection team chief on three highly classified submarine Special Operations. An innovator throughout his career, while on the staff of the Naval War College (NWC) 1982-1986, he developed the first war games ever for space systems as well as ones for command & control systems, and for special warfare, conducted anywhere. Fifteen years later, immediately following 9/11, he co-led a series of multi-agency/government/private industry wargames and seminars to investigate the maritime vulnerabilities of the USA and devise potential counters to those vulnerabilities. His report of that effort, written at the direction of President Bush, became the initial draft of what became the National Concept of Operations for Maritime Domain Awareness.

Book preview

New Sentinels of the Sea:

Satellite AIS and the Birth of Global Maritime Awareness

Copyright ©2022

by Geo. Guy Thomas, CDR, USN (Ret.)

Library of Congress

Cataloging-publication-in-data

ISBN 979-8-9853477-3-9

ISBN 9798-9853477-6-0 (e-book)

First Edition

Editors:

William Lambrecht

Sandra Olivetti Martin

New Bay Books • Fairhaven, Maryland

[e-mail]

Design by Suzanne Shelden

Shelden Studios • Prince Frederick, Maryland

[e-mail]

Cover imagery:

Digital collages use the following two images:

Global Telecommunication Network Around the World

by NicoElNino, Shutterstock

Satellites and Networks, by Andrey VP, Shutterstock

Note on Type:

Titles and Headers set in Arial

Text is set in Garamond Premier Pro

Dedication

To my smart, beautiful, indefatigable wife, Clelia. It is her untiring support over the past 25 years that has given me the time and energy that has allowed me to pursue research on my concepts, and write both this book and my memoir of my time in the intelligence world, A Silent Warrior Steps Out of the Shadows, while she built, and now runs our historic, award-winning Wilson House Bed & Breakfast. I could not have done it without her.

The best idea came from Guy Thomas. He said we should put AIS receivers in satellites and watch from space. This, he argued, would give us an almost worldwide view of the ships carrying AIS. After the meeting, I asked Guy how we could confirm that his idea was possible and how we might implement it (at the time I did not know Guy had been thinking and talking about this for years)

—Jeffrey P. High

(Former director, US Coast Guard Maritime Domain Awareness Program Integration Office)

Foreword

Sentinels of the Sea: A New Solution to an Old Problem

Intelligence veteran George Guy Thomas, author of A Silent Warrior Steps Out of the Shadows, herein presents the inside story of his struggles in his post-9/11 crusade for security on the seas, which led to conceiving and implementing Satellite Automatic Identification System ship tracking and a concept he calls C-SIGMA (Collaboration in Space for International Global Maritime Awareness). Thomas, a quadruple qualified (surface, air, submarine, space) retired Navy commander, warns that American ports remain vulnerable as he presses for global cooperation in patrolling the seas from space for safety and security.

Thomas is nominated for the National Medal of Technology and Innovation, the nation’s highest honor for technological achievement, for overcoming severe obstacles and dramatically changing the maritime world by lifting the veil of opaqueness enshrouding the seas.

He was also nominated three times for the Space Foundation’s Technology Hall of Fame, and in 2021, Thomas received their lifetime achievement award for his role in Protection and Increased Safety of the Maritime Environment. The citation asserts that as a result of his leadership, commerce and supply chain operations can flow safely around the globe, while security threats and needed resilience to ever-dynamic risks are adequately addressed by our nation and its allies.

His efforts engendered increased global security, better protection of fisheries and the marine environment, and hastened recovery from disasters on or adjacent to the world’s oceans. The innovations he brought about have been referred to as a paradigm shift in the maritime world on the order of the chronometer, the steam engine, the screw propeller, radar and satellite navigation.

Award presented to Cdr. Thomas

Praise for Thomas

S-AIS is a fundamental technology that impacts every single American’s life every day…It only exists because of Guy Thomas.

Keith Masback. Former Chief Executive Officer of the United States Geospatial Intelligence Foundation

His extraordinary vision and persistence brought space-based Satellite Automatic Identification System (S-AIS) to the world. His writing has been a primary guidepost to not just us but the entire marine world.

Dirk Vande Ryse. Director, Situational Awareness and Monitoring Division, European Border and Coast Guard Agency

"Guy Thomas’s creation and implementation of S-AIS and C-SIGMA critically support American and global maritime security, safety, economic progress, trillions of dollars in maritime trade, and environmental stewardship of the oceans.

Julio J. Gutiérrez. Capt., US Navy (Ret.); Maritime Security Consultant

Table of Contents

Introduction

Chapter 1 An Attack

Chapter 2 When the World Works Together

Chapter 3 A Mission Takes Shape

Chapter 4 Confronting Naysayers

Chapter 5 In Secret No More

Chapter 6 In the Realm of Space, A Nod From Rahm

Chapter 7 When Wargames Expose Vulnerability

Chapter 8 Networking to Success

Chapter 9 A Call for Global Cooperation

Chapter 10 The Case for C-SIGMA

Chapter 11 Eyes Above: Operations in the Global Commons of Space

Chapter 12 A Flourishing Technology

Appendices

Appendix One: A Maritime Traffic-Tracking System: Cornerstone of Maritime Homeland Defense

Appendix One Expanded: Maritime Traffic Systems for Maritime Domain Awareness

Appendix Two: A Systems Engineering Approach to Building a Maritime NORAD

Appendix Three: Meeting Maritime Security Challenges in the 21st Century

Appendix Four: International Collaboration Is THE Silver Bullet

Appendix Five: Space-based Global Maritime Awareness Is a House

Appendix Six: Space-based Global Maritime Awareness Is About to Come of Age

Glossary

Letters and Memoranda

Space Foundation Award letter January 6, 2021

Johns Hopkins Internal Memorandum July 28, 2020

National Medal of Technology and Innovation Nomination Letters:

Jeffrey P. High

John J. Kubricky

Julio J. Gutiérrez

Keith Masback

Dirk Van de Ryse

C-SIGMA Conferences

Acknowledgments

Introduction

The memoir of the first two-thirds of my professional life is titled A Silent Warrior Steps Out of the Shadows. I chose that title as the first 40 years of my professional life were in the shadows of the classified world. In the shadow world, I was what was known as a silent warrior because, in those days, you could not discuss your work with anyone, not even your family. I was in the US Navy for 23 years, for the last 20 directly involved in collecting intelligence as a member of the little-known Naval Security Group. The second 20-plus years of my professional life I spent in research and development directly related to intelligence collection, analysis, and dissemination to users in a tactically useful timeframe.

I use the term tactically with care because I operated and worked at the tactical level as opposed to the strategic or operational levels most of my career. There are three levels of military operations. From the top down, they are strategic, relating to the gaining of overall or long-term military advantage; operational, relating to the overall functioning and activities of a military organization; and tactical, relating to, or constituting actions carefully planned to gain an immediate specific military end. My career in the shadow world focused on the here and now, the tactical level, although the collection of intelligence spans all three.

My memoir took 19 months to receive publishing approval by the six organizations I had either worked for or with in my 40-plus year career in the classified world. Those six were the National Security Agency, the Central Intelligence Agency, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the National Security Council, and the Navy, Air Force, and Coast Guard’s intelligence branches. Views and opinions in this book are mine and do not reflect those of the NSA or other agencies. For the past 15 years, I have consciously avoided the classified world and concentrated on unclassified space systems. How and why I made that transition from the shadow world to the unclassified commercial space realm is an excellent place to start this story. But let’s set the stage.

A well-worn adage advises, Find a job you love, and you will never work a day in your life. That is precisely what happened to me. I left a prestigious, well-paying job as a researcher at Johns Hopkins’ Applied Physics Lab to take a tax-free $25,000 a year cut in contributions to my retirement account to go to work as a civil servant. I do not regret my transition from the classified to unclassified world in any way.

I originally planned to include this story as part of my memoir, but I decided to publish this part of my life as a separate book based on many people’s advice. This allowed me to provide a focused history of the start of Maritime Domain Awareness, Satellite Automatic Identification System (S-AIS), and space-based Maritime Situational Awareness, endeavors that are still very much in play on the world stage today.

In separating the two books, I also hope to help foster focused discussion on the increasing utility of Earth observation space systems to dramatically improve safety and security in the maritime domain and increase protection of the marine environment and its resources. Global Maritime Awareness, as I call these efforts, will also aid in marine-related disaster mitigation and recovery and significantly help improve the marine transportation system.

From 12 September 2001 (the day after 9/11) until 22 April 2005 (the first C-SIGMA meeting), I concentrated on the many maritime safety and security issues related to counterterrorism, counter-piracy, and smuggling. Why will be discussed later. At the first C-SIGMA meeting, the Norwegian attendees introduced me to two other maritime world concerns: environmental and resource protection/ conservation. Until then, I had not thought about the importance of environmental and resource protection. Indeed, I knew almost nothing about either of them. However, by the end of 2005, I knew these two issues to be huge, fundamental problems.

About the same time, I also realized one Global Maritime Awareness System could address all four concerns: security, safety, environmental protection, and resource conservation. It would be a boon to all involved in legal activities related to the maritime world and a significant hindrance to all involved in illegal activities at sea. It would also substantially increase marine safety in many instances.

Additionally, I recognized that S-AIS would provide geolocation and identification data that would be the crucial underpinning of this system. By then it was clear the efficient utilization of the rapidly expanding number and capabilities of Earth observation space systems, with S-AIS leading the way, was the key to developing a solution to all of these needs. Thus, since early 2006 I have focused on building one system to address all four maritime problems: Security, Safety, plus Environment and Resource protection. I have called this effort C-SIGMA: Collaboration in Space for International Global Maritime Awareness.

This book starts with a short story that illustrates why C-SIGMA is very important and then relates how satellite AIS came to be, continues on to how it has changed the maritime world forever, and concludes with a discussion of opportunities it offers us for the future. It is told from my viewpoint because C-SIGMA has been the primary professional focus of my life since I first had the idea to put an AIS receiver on a satellite in low Earth orbit and use it as the long-desired global ship tracking tool on 4 October 2001.

This is also the story of how Maritime Domain Awareness and space-based Maritime Situational Awareness came to be common concepts and capabilities in the maritime world today. The book ends with my best estimate of how these three capabilities—S-AIS, Maritime Domain Awareness and space-based Maritime Situational Awareness—will coalesce into Global Maritime Awareness (GMA). Then comes a final call to action to build the Global Maritime Awareness system via C-SIGMA.

This book is timely because our ports and coasts remain at risk. In the years just following 9/11, Homeland Security and the Defense Department were very concerned about unknown vessels entering our harbors undetected. Their concerns centered on illegal narcotics and aliens but also included saboteurs with weapons, up to and including, heaven forbid, nuclear and other weapons of mass destruction.

This last item, nuclear weapons, was not an unreal pipedream. We had reports that, at the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, a number of small but powerful nuclear weapons had disappeared, no one knew where they were. Speculation was that they were in the control of Russian gangsters and might end up in the hands of anti-American terrorists. Probably the easiest, most effective way to get these weapons into the US, and place them where they could do the most damage would be to put them on small ships, possibly fishing boats, and sail them into one or more of our harbors.

The terror weapon did not need to be a nuclear one. Chemical and biological weapons could also be highly effective in shutting down a major harbor such as San Diego, Houston, or even Los Angeles/Long Beach.

A day’s collection with the ship type shown by colors.

Courtesy of ORBCOMM.

Our list of potential targets was the 18 major ports and a couple of hundred smaller ones. After James Woolsey, a former director of the CIA, gave a speech in San Diego over 15 years ago citing this as a major threat, he and I had a short discussion on this subject. He pointed out that while he was with the CIA, we had lost track of two tractor trailer loads of anthrax in Iraq, just before the war broke out. He suspected they were smuggled into Syria, which was much more stable in those days. He further pointed out that a half-gallon of anthrax exploded on a boat in San Diego harbor could lock down the city for months.

From 2005 to 2007, I participated in several studies focused on how we could detect, track and identify all vessels, from mammoth ships transporting oil and cargo, down to vessels of 20 to 25 feet. We were especially concerned about the smaller vessels. Indeed, the last study I participated in for Homeland Security Science & Technology focused on the small boat problem lasted from 2015 to 2019. It was canceled only when its funds were diverted to build a wall on our southern border.

Why we have not built the system to counter this problem baffles me. A global system to address the problems of the maritime domain needs to be built. Given the demonstrated animosity of some groups, it is especially needed in the United States.

Chapter One

An Attack

The vessel was unremarkable, a working boat of some sort, with ample evidence of having spent much more time at sea than in maintenance yards. Indeed, it had a worn look about it as it moved past the sea buoy marking the entrance to the channel into San Diego Bay and turned east toward the one of most beautiful cities in the United States.

San Diego is also the home for a major part of the US Navy’s Pacific Fleet, and that was one of the reasons this nondescript vessel had been tasked by decision-makers half a world away to enter the picturesque harbor before dawn this day. That was not the only reason to select San Diego. It is also a major commercial harbor, as are the five other ports along the Pacific Coast where the same basic scenario was being enacted that morning. In Long Beach, Oakland, Seattle, Vancouver and Prince Rupert, equally unremarkable vessels of medium size, each less than 100 feet and 300 tons but clearly ocean-transit capable, entered its assigned port at basically the same time.

The working boat was about 75 feet in length and 100 tons displacement. The size had been carefully selected. The superb seamen of Southeast Asia who plotted and were executing this operation were very aware that the International Maritime Organization requires all ships over 300 tons to comply with many ship tracking and safety regulations. All maritime nations of the world abide by these regulations. With vessels that did not come under those regulations, the chances of detection by the Navy or Coast Guard of the United States or Canada were significantly reduced.

The vessels were pirated or purchased, one by one, in the South China Sea or the approaches to the Straits of Malacca, hidden in the rivers and estuaries of Indonesia and the Philippines, carefully checked to be sure they could make the one-way trip to the West Coast of North America and placed in readiness. Finding crew was not a problem, for Indonesia is home of the largest group of radical Islamists, with a large number in the southern Philippines as well. All were excellent seamen, hardened to privation, having spent many years at sea on fishing or small cargo boats on which most westerns would not set foot.

The six boats had gathered in the eastern approaches to the Celebes Sea and crossed the Pacific Ocean, the largest body of water in the world, in very loose formation, miles apart. Each vessel was equipped with the normal radar associated with its type, AIS, GPS and two satellite phones. The GPS was in constant use to maintain track and relative position. The AIS was used only in a receive mode. When it warned that an unknown ship was approaching, radar was turned on to keep track of it and subtly adjusted their course to avoid all contact if possible. The satellite phones were used hardly at all, and then only with very short transmissions. The same phone was never used twice in a row. The six vessels, traveling well outside any shipping lanes or fishing grounds, had taken pains to appear as if they were not sailing together. They had rendezvoused only twice, once north of Eniwetok and Bikini, and once well north of Hawaii. One of the vessels was a tug, and it towed a barge loaded with enough fuel and food for the six vessels to reach their targets with ease. After the last rendezvous and all remaining fuel and food were off-loaded, the barge was scuttled with charges placed in its hold. It sank quickly, and the six vessels dispersed to meet four days later 275 miles off northern California for one last time. At this meeting, final plans were reviewed and all were checked to ensure they were ready in every way to carry out their divine mission.

There was some minor difference in arrival times at each port, and that was no accident. Each arrival time had been carefully calculated. Each had a specific target, and the time needed to travel the distances from the harbor entrance to their assigned point was different for each, thus requiring different entrance times. Each vessel needed to enter its assigned harbor in the predawn darkness because they did not want to be observed too closely as they each dumped what appeared, to any untrained observers, to be a series of 55-gallon drums over the side in the center of each ship channel at several minute intervals. Some of the dumping was delayed as the crews took pains to not be observed from any passing ship. That did not bother the captains involved as randomness was a virtue in this case.

The devices were mines, with timers set to arm them two hours after they were laid. However, mines were not, even as deadly as they were, the most deadly cargo these vessels carried. On each ship’s deck was a loose sack, made of very heavy gauge rubber and hermetically sealed, with between 25 and 50 pounds of anthrax, along with an aerial dispersant. The sack rested on a four-foot square steel plate with a wire mesh rim. The whole vessel was rigged as a bomb, and the intent was for the plate to be blown into the air, for the mesh to rip the bag open and for natural forces to do the rest, literally scattering the deadly cargo to the winds.

At exactly 0740, each of the ships arrived off its assigned spot which, with one exception, was calculated to be as close as possible to the major cargo-handling facility in each city. That one exception was San Diego, where the nondescript boat positioned itself upwind from the aircraft carriers tied up at North Island and then, turning sharply, made straight for the nearest carrier. The Navy small craft assigned to warn off civilian boats that got too close to the carriers immediately noted the change in behavior of the unremarkable ship and, increasing speed to its maximum, moved to intercept, broadcasting a warning both on loudhailer and on the harbor common radio channel ordering the unknown vessel to change its course or be fired on. But the warning was too little, too late. The ship’s first defense, a floating barrier stopped the vessel in its tracks. Thirty seconds later the Navy guard boat pulled alongside, its crew with M-4s locked and loaded, ready to board the vessel piled on the floating barrier. The crew never had the chance.

The explosion was heard all the way to Tijuana to the south and Carlsbad to the north. The Navy boat had done its mission and the carrier was untouched, but the cloud generated by the explosion was far more deadly than anyone imagined. Sailors and officers alike clamored to the side of nearby Navy ships to gawk at the smoking ruins. Likewise, seamen on the commercial fishing boats and merchant ships and thousands of people all around the bay stopped to stare at the column of smoke rising from the ruined ship lodged on the carrier’s floating barrier. No one had any idea that a week later many of them would be dead, succumbing in a most horrible manner, or that the economy of the United States, and thus the world, would be devastated.

Each of the other five vessels also carried out its mission, and anthrax was now widely scattered over the six major West Coast ports. Additionally, in each port at least one of the newly laid mines had performed its task and badly damaged or sunk a merchant vessel. In San Diego, the first vessel to hit one of the mines was a visiting Japanese Navy Helicopter Destroyer. Its crew was preparing for the continuation of its goodwill visit to Canada, the United States and Mexico that morning and had quickly gotten underway at the sound of the explosion. The captain had placed the ship at general quarters as a precaution and thus it was saved from sinking. But 26 of the crew died and the ship was barely able to return to a berth at the Navy base. It would be many months before it saw the circling ospreys that welcomed ships entering Yokosuka, its homeport near the mouth of Tokyo Bay.

Even though the death toll of the explosion and then the subsequent anthrax poisonings was limited to a few thousand, the panic engendered by the attacks caused all six cities to halt most services. Chaos ensued, both in the ports and in the world’s stock markets. It would take several years to recover, and when it did the world as we now know was completely changed. The economies of the United States and Canada were badly damaged; Europe, Russia, China and Japan also suffered substantial losses. India, Brazil and South Africa exhibited more clout on the international stage.

Al-Qaeda, praising a new ally in the radical Islamists of Indonesia, claimed responsibility for this most devastating of all attacks on the non-believers of the world. The West Coast attack, like 9/11, had taken months of planning. But it is the belief of the faithful that time is on their side. When it comes to maritime vulnerability, they could be right.

Chapter Two

When the World Works Together

The West Coast attack did not happen, of course, due in large measure to the subject of this book—Satellite Automatic Identification System. Maritime Domain Awareness and Satellite AIS has been my passion for two decades, and I believe the fruits of my labor would be the reason for an alternative fate that follows for those ill-intentioned vessels gathering in the Celebes Sea.

A Finnish SAR (synthetic aperture radar) satellite on a routine collection over the Papahānaumokuākea Marine National Monument, the vast expanse of water west of the Hawaiian Islands extending over 1,000 nautical miles past Midway Island, detected three of the vessels on a course that could only take them to the Aleutians Island Chain in Alaska. An anomaly detection software tool called PANDA, originally developed by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, noted the unusual course